Today I got distracted by Review Board, a tool to help companies do code reviews. Because I was too lazy to deal with the dependancies I decided to look for a virtual machine for Review Board, all configured for me.

This was probably a stupid idea in retrospect.

I found a virtual image provided by rPath/rBuilder with (come to find out) no documentation. None at all. Which is annoying because to set up Review Board you need a “superuser” for the web app.

So, in order to set up Review Board on this box you need to do these things:

1. Log into the machine. root with no password will log you into the shell
2. rm /srv/reviewboard/data/reviewboard.sqlite
3. /srv/reviewboard/manage.py syncdb. It’ll ask you if you want to create a superuser. Say yes.
4. chmod 777 /srv/reviewboard/data/reviewboard.sqlite

Yes, the chmod 777 is a security risk. However, if you were to actually deploy this you’d want to use MySQL or something like that.

The settings files are in the /srv/reviewboard/ directory.

Also: the virtual machine hosts Review Board on port 80.

What is neat about the rPath/rBuilder virtual appliance is that they offer an EC2 virtual machine with Review Board too…

Hope this saves someone some time…

Update: And, having done all that, the machine doesn’t have PySVN on it, nor developer tools (gcc, easy_install) to bootstrap it myself. Arg.